My Addiction to Time...

...and I don't mean a'la Morris Day and His Jungle Lovin'.

I mean Time. The abstract of all abstracts. The great annoyance we can't control. The spectre that we can't avoid. The highway upon which death travels towards us with breakneck speed and... enough of the melodramatic stuff. Let me just get to the point.
I am a very time conscious person. Those of you out there like me know exactly what I mean even before I explain it. As I was telling a friend this morning, I always know what time it is within five minutes. Why? Because I can guarantee you that I checked my watch no more than five minutes ago. People like me are not patient. We are not good in settings where it is rude to check your watch. We often inadvertently make people think that we are not interested in what they are saying, nor do we have any desire to look upon them.
Allow me to be the first to assure you that we do care. We truly do. We may be constantly checking our watches, but we are listening. Most time conscious people will also tend to exhibit A.D.D. in some form or fashion... more proof. We can do a hundred things at a time and still be paying attention to you. I promise. Do like your mother did and ask me (or another) what you just said the next time you suspect a loss of attention.
Be wary, though, because there are those in the world that are NOT time conscious. They are merely looking at their watch because they don't like you. They have no desire to listen to you. They are evil...
So obviously, you need to way to spot the difference. While it may be nearly impossible to tell a time conscious person by the way they check their watch or by dilation radius of their eyes, if you know the person, you can tell. Allow me to share the characteristics of a time conscious person with you:
1) By 8am, their entire schedule for the day is mapped out
2) They have a plan for the week, the weekend, the year, five years, ten years, etc. And they are more than happy to share it with you.
3) They have a reasonable idea of how much longer they have to live on this earth. For example: (from DeathClock)

You may find it strange, but we have a schedule to keep, dammit!
4) If you keep them somewhere one minute longer than they had planned on being there, they will start to fidget like a treed squirrel until you unlock the trap. With rationalization, they will give you five minutes of leeway. After 15, you've lost them completely because all of their attention has been refocused on reorganizing their schedule. Over an hour and their head will explode before you eyes, Scanners style.
5) If you are late, they will be angry. If you are 5-15 minutes late, no big deal but you will hear about it. 15 minutes to an hour, they will be curt with you the entire time. over an hour and they won't schedule anything else with you ever again.
6) Stephen Covey is their personal hero... and you are a "Time Burglar."
If you've seen or detected a couple or all of these sings, breathe easy because the offender is just an anally TC person. If not, you are speaking to a jerk who needs to be punished. Keep him or her in the room for AS LONG AS YOU HUMANLY CAN.

ET v. Blade II

I stood there in shame and watched. I almost couldn't believe it. Neither could ET...

It was 10PM last Friday night when my fiancee and I went to see ET at a Theater near my apartment. We had been planning for months to see the re-release on opening night. Both of us are in our early twenties and like many people our age, ET was the first movie we saw on the big screen. We saw a preview of the re-release last November and had been intending ever since to see this greatest of movies when it opened. Immediately after I got off work that Friday, I drove over to the Theater to grab a couple of tickets to the show, in anticipation that the Theater would be flooded with fellow nostalgics and even families who saw the movie when they were young and wanted to take their children to catch the flick.
I caught my storybook dose of foreshadowing later that evening as I was making dinner. My roommate came to the living room and announced that he really wanted to see Blade II that weekend. I scoffed and asked him why not ET, after which he released a series of insults towards the movie and my masculinity, all of which fell of deaf ears. Well, that's just Joe, I thought. Engaged though I am, I like to convince myself that I am one of those men who still grasps to his manhood with ferocity, even though the love of my life is certainly at the pinnacle of my priority list.
My beautiful bride-to-be and I headed to the theater at about 9:45, in further anticipation that earlier said mass of people might prevent us from getting a choice seat. We arrived, parked, and headed inside to our theater. Once upstairs, I saw a line bending around the corner for entrance into a theater. I was certain that this was our movie, and I shuddered at the thought of sitting in the front row and craning for two hours, but I was still ready to accept the challenge. Much to my intense disappointment, the line was NOT for everyone's loveable alien, it was a line for the celebration of blood and Wesley Snipes... it was a line for Blade II.
I was disgusted. One of the greatest, and most widely appealing, science fiction movies of all time was being shown up by the SEQUEL to one of the worst and most pointless. How could this happen? In one of my "what is this world coming to?" moments, I tried to understand they why and how of it all.
I heard a few arguments later in the weekend that caused me to rethink my feelings. It was 10:30 at night, a bigger crowd for Blade would make sense and it was only one theater, I'll bet it did well elsewhere was another. I took these to heart an decided to reserve my judgement until Monday, when weekend returns would come in on IMDB.com. Well, I checked and ET was not in first, not in second, but in third place behind Blade II and Ice Age. (which is a great movie, by the way) Both arguments are thus dismissed.
This event was one of those things that almost makes me feel like a Republican, though I am most certainly not. By what logic could this world choose the pinnacle of theatrical violence over a story so full of morals and goodness?
What a minute... what am I saying? It's not as if this is the first time I've ever seen such evidence. Every day, we see the signs of a world that is slowly shedding any semblance of morality for the padded room of relativism. But for me, this occurrence hit home because it was a first hand look at that evidence. You hear it on the news, you read it in the paper. But those mediums seem almost to us like the story of ET: lacking in reality. it was only when I saw such evidence laid before me as upon a witness stand that it suddenly hit me.
And it made me a little sad. It made me mourn for a moment for a revival in our land and throughout the earth.
All because this world failed to properly honor our number one alien.
I'm sorry ET... maybe you should try again in another 20.